Manage Facebook Privacy in a S.N.A.P

Like many services, Facebook has has been blasted by the tech crowd, who’ve chastised the giant network for their privacy controls, leaving many users apprehensive about using the service.

And who could blame users for being worried? The wrong content on your Facebook wall could hinder your chances of getting a job, get you fired or overall violate information that you consider private.

The new ‘check-in’ Facebook feature, Places (now a competitor to FourSquare), will likely begin another crap storm of privacy fallacies. Users are already complaining about the default settings that will undoubtedly confuse the general public.

It’s not that Facebook doesn’t offer privacy settings, but it’s clear that the common user doesn’t understand them and if they did we wouldn’t hear about teachers being fired for accidentally mistaking a public comment for a private conversation.

S.N.A.P. (social network analyzer for privacy) brings some transparency to the dizzying world of Facebook privacy by assigning a grade to sections of the user’s Facebook profile. As an example if all of your Facebook photos were all public, you’d likely receive a big fat “F” for photo security.

After granting the app access to Facebook it will analyze the content individually; status updates, uploaded videos, albums, notes, tagged photos & videos, groups, events, keywords and pages. Nicely, all of a user’s FB content is listed within the app and items are directly linked to your profile so finding them and changing the privacy settings is not burdensome.

It’s easy to use the Dr. Phil approach to Facebook and simply tell users if they’re concerned with privacy “don’t use Facebook” but seriously, it’s safe to say we’ve all invested too much time and made too many relationships to look back now.

About Brodie Beta

Brodie Beta aka @iPhonegirl is a tech blogger, social media strategist and the Co-founder of Drink Social Media. She has written columns for well-known technology sites including The Next Web and a national newspaper in Canada, The Globe and Mail. Brodie is also the social media strategist at CountMeIn, a social-gifting platform for collaborating on gadgets and products on Facebook.